Dust Up with the Detective (3 page)

He motioned for her to take the lead, admittedly because he wanted to watch her butt but ostensibly so he could make sure she was safe as she steadily made her way down the hill. He wasn’t disappointed as he watched her. She moved with a quiet grace, smooth and steady as she carefully picked her way between the granite boulders as they headed into the maw of the earth.

Blake took out her flashlight and clicked it on. “Is this it?” she asked, motioning toward the dark, cavelike entrance.

In truth, it had been years since he’d been to the mine. The last time he’d been there the opening had been easily identifiable. Yet as she flashed her light downward, all he could make out were mounds of pegmatite-rich, reddish dirt.

“It should be here. Right here.” He frowned. Grabbing his phone, he clicked on the light and moved into the muddy hole. “There should be a way in here.” He prodded around, but the ground that filled the entrance shaft was as solid and compact as cement.

“Are you sure this is the place?” Blake asked.

“I thought so.”

There was something wrong. The dirt in the entrance was wet, but it hadn’t rained in a month. And even though the dirt that filled the shaft’s entrance was compact, the ground under their feet was loose, compressing as he shifted his weight. It had to have been freshly exposed.

He took a step forward. His toe caught on a loose rock, tripping him. He shone his light at the ground. Beneath the cobble that littered the area was a crushed lantern—the lantern Robert hung on the entrance of the mine any time he was underground.

“You don’t think—” Blake started.

Jeremy stopped her with a raise of his hand. He couldn’t stand hearing what he already knew—the mine had collapsed.

He prayed Robert wasn’t inside, but the lamp told him all he needed to know. Robert was trapped, and there was only a slight chance he could still be alive.

Chapter Four

The insides of Jeremy’s hands where covered in blisters. Dirt caked his nails, and his knuckles were bloody where he had torn them against the earth, but the job of freeing his brother had been too big for one man.

Blake watched the firefighters milling around outside the mine, taking a break from their attempts to break through the concrete-like blockade that filled its entrance. They had been at it for hours. They’d finally gotten an excavator on-site and received the go-ahead to start a full excavation. From the look on Jeremy’s face, it had already taken too long.

Blake walked up the hill toward Robert’s house and motioned for Jeremy to follow.

Jeremy walked beside her, his movement slow and numb. She had to do something, anything to help. For the second time that day, she felt powerless in her inability to control the events that swirled around them.

“Have you asked your parents if they’ve heard anything from Robert? Maybe he’s tried to call?” As soon as the words left her lips, she knew they were in vain. Of course he couldn’t call, but she had to say something to make the agonizing look on Jeremy’s face disappear.

“There’s no cell service in the mine—I can guarantee it.” His eyes darkened, and his face tightened, the sexy lines around his eyes deepening. “Besides, there’s no use in getting them up in arms. If we call them, they’ll ask too many questions.”

He was right. There was no sense alerting his parents that something was amiss if this was some kind of wild-goose chase. She could just imagine her mother getting a similar call. In a matter of minutes, Gemma West would have been on the scene and attempting to tell the crew exactly how they should be doing their jobs. No, family could wait.

She stepped up onto the porch and pressed her face against the window in the door. Inside Robert’s one-room cabin was an open sofa bed and a wood-burning fireplace. The walls were covered in pictures of elk and bear, and a mounted trout hung over the kitchen window. A gun rack hung over the bed, and a small-caliber rifle sat nestled in its grips. It was as if the place had been intentionally stripped of all things feminine.

“Do you think it’s possible Tiffany left him?” she asked.

Jeremy shrugged, staring ahead as if he was lost deep in thought.

“Is this what the house looked like the last time you were here?”

“What do you mean?” Jeremy moved beside her and peered inside.

“I...uh... I just mean I don’t see anything of Tiffany’s. Wouldn’t you think if she was still living here you’d at least see a stray hair tie or something? It’s almost like there hasn’t been a woman here in a long time.”

“Robert and Tiffany...” Jeremy gave a tired sigh. “They have more issues than
National Geographic
. They’re constantly at each other’s throats. If she left, good for her. It’s the best for both of them.”

Robert’s personal life was in shambles. Could that have meant he would have wanted to end things? As a miner, he had everything he needed to cave in the mine’s entrance. Maybe it had been his way of never being found.

On the table underneath the window was a ledger. She squinted through the glass as she tried to make out the penciled notes. She read the most recent one scrawled onto the time sheets.

September 23 Time in: 06:30 Time out:

The time out sat empty, echoing all the things it could possibly mean—or the one thing she feared most.

“Was your brother having any other issues? Anything going on as far as his mental health is concerned?”

Jeremy stepped around to the bay window and peered in through the glass. “My mother said he’s been agitated lately. Thought it had something to do with Tiffany.”

“Any signs of depression?” She instinctively looked toward the sofa bed, where the sheets sat in a rumpled mess at the end of the mattress.

“I don’t know. It’s hard to say. Robert has always been one who kept his cards close to his chest.”

There was something in Jeremy’s voice, almost as if there were pangs of guilt that rested just under the surface of his words.

“Do you think he would have ever tried to commit suicide?”

Jeremy jerked.

She shouldn’t have just thrown it out there. He was feeling something...some sort of guilt or perhaps vulnerability; she couldn’t be sure. She should have been softer in her delivery, but the officer in her corrected her. She had to ask the questions that needed to be asked. She couldn’t censor herself to spare his feelings.

“I would hope not,” he finally answered. “I would hope he wouldn’t do anything so stupid.”

“Stupid?” She thought a lot of things about suicide, and what a mistake it was for anyone to take his or her own life, but rarely did she think it was stupid.

“That’s not what I meant,” Jeremy corrected himself. “I would just hope that he would ask for help before he made the choice to end things.”

“You said he was tight-lipped.”

“He is...but...” Jeremy’s mouth puckered and his eye turned storm. “Look, he’s probably fine. Let’s not go there, okay?”

He’d shut her down. Not that she could blame him. Maybe he was right. Maybe an accident had caused the cave-in, and Robert was sitting in the mine, hoping someone would find him.

“I’m sorry, Jeremy.”

He seemed to force a smile, the lines of his lips curled in harsh juxtaposition to the rest of his face. “No...you’re fine. If I was in your position, I’d be asking the same thing.”

She nodded, not sure of what exactly to say that would make things less tense between them, but there was no fixing what riddled the air.

A fireman walked up the hill after them, stopping before he reached the porch. His cheeks were spattered with dirt and sweat. “We’ve broken through. Looks like the mine shaft is intact.”

“Great. That’s great,” Jeremy said. “Was there anything that could give us a clue as to why the mine entrance collapsed? Any evidence of explosives?”

The fireman shrugged, his sweaty shirt hugging his chest as he moved. “The excavator did the trick in getting us in, but it tore the hell out of everything. It’s hard to say what you and your investigators will find.”

Firefighters were like Wreck-It Ralph, always tearing and bulldozing away anything that stood in their way, but this was one of those times that Blake was happy to have their help.

They followed them down the hill, night trailing them. Ahead the fire crews had set up industrial-strength lights that burned away the darkness. All except for the oblong entrance of the mine, where the light disappeared like it was being sucked into a black hole.

“We haven’t sent anyone in. We were waiting for you,” the fireman said, stopping at the mouth of the cave.

“Robert!” Jeremy called, his voice echoing in the mine and cascading deep into the darkness.

There was no answer. Instead they were met with the excavator’s treads rattling and clanging as a man drove it up the embankment and toward the waiting tractor trailer.

Jeremy moved forward, but Blake grabbed hold of his biceps, stopping him. “Wait.”

“My brother’s in there.”

“I hear you, but we need to be careful.”

Jeremy gazed into the mine.

Blake took out her notepad and turned to the firefighter who’d headed the excavation. “How deep was the cave-in?”

“It varied, but mostly everything was about ten to fifteen feet.”

She made a note and, after sliding the camera from her pocket, took a picture of the scene. “But you didn’t find evidence of an explosion?”

The fireman shook his head. “No, but look,” he said, running his hand down a structural support beam they must have put into place to keep from having the mine fall back in on itself. “We found support beams like these every three feet. You’d have to check on the code, but with these four-by-fours like that, it seems like more than enough structural support to sustain the weight above. There’s been no earthquakes, at least that I know of, and no major rainstorms or weather that would have caused the ground to give way. I’d bet my bottom dollar that someone did this on purpose. If it was imploded, it was with a low-grade explosive. Nothing big enough to cause major damage, just enough firepower to get the job done.”

Blake nodded, taking note of his opinion. It wouldn’t be admissible in court, but at least she had an idea of what could have happened and she could write it up when she filed her report.

“Is it stable deeper in?” she asked.

The firefighter shrugged. “It’s hard to say what you’ll find. Oftentimes, explosions can have a bit of a cascading effect. If you go in, you need to make sure you take your time and be safe. You want me or one of my team to go in with you?”

“I’ve got it,” Jeremy said. “I’ll go in. There’s no sense in you all going in and putting yourself in danger.” He turned to look at her. “I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

A faint heat rose in her cheeks, but she tried to staunch the fire. “Jeremy, you may be a detective, but this isn’t your jurisdiction. You can’t go in. It’s my job.”

“But this is my family.”

If she were in his shoes, she wouldn’t have taken no for an answer, either. She had to follow the rules, but it didn’t feel right leaving him out. “Since you’re the only person who’s been in the mine, you can go in as a search volunteer. Nothing more. Don’t touch anything. Got it?”

He nodded.

“Here,” the fireman said, handing them each hard hats complete with headlamps. “You’re going to need these.”

They took them, and Jeremy put his on. In the night’s shadows, he looked like a miner from an old tintype photograph, dirt smudging his cheeks and his eyelashes covered in dust.

“Let’s go,” Blake said, starting down the shaft.

The place smelled of dank, wet dirt and iron-rich minerals, the scent of deep earth—full and heady. The tunnel was wide enough for two to walk side by side with their shoulders rubbing against the walls. A tendril of claustrophobia wrapped around her, but she ignored the way it tightened around her chest and threatened to squeeze until panic oozed from every pore.

No. I’m strong. I can handle this.

She repeated the mantra over and over as she moved deeper, but it did little to quell her anxiety.

She walked, Jeremy close beside her, until the tunnel branched in a Y shape. She suddenly wished they had found a map, anything to help them avoid getting lost in the maze.

Jeremy took a large breath of air, like he was going to yell, but Blake shushed him. “Don’t yell. If anything is unstable...”
We could be killed.
She resisted the urge to voice her fears. “Just don’t.”

He looked around them, like he could almost read her mind, and nodded.

A bead of earth slipped loose from the wall and cascaded down the side like an earthen waterfall.

“Right or left?” she asked, motioning toward the break in their path.

“Left. Robert never did anything right in his entire life.” He gave a dry laugh.

She went left. The walls seemed to move in closer and the dark seemed even more ominous as they made their way deeper into the mountain. Each few hundred feet, the tunnel grew narrower, until she had to turn sideways to squeeze through. Her heart thrashed in her chest as her claustrophobia intensified.

She hated small spaces. What if she got stuck? What if the earth shifted around them and they were trapped? What would happen to Megan? What would happen to her mother?

The tunnel narrowed even more. Her chest brushed against the rock. And, as she exhaled, the warm air bounced off the rock in front of her and she could feel it on her cheek.

It was too close.

The walls were too close.

Jeremy was too close.

She couldn’t do this.

Something ran over her shoe. She jumped with a squeal, slamming her hard hat into the top of the cave.

“I can’t, Jeremy.” She tried to control her breathing, but now it was coming in rapid, panicked heaves.

He took her hand, running his thumb over her skin. “Okay. It’s okay,” he soothed.

His heartbeat was so strong that she could feel it through his grip. Did he hate this as much as she did?

Jeremy led her back down the tunnel from where they’d come, until he reached a spot wide enough for them both to stand. “Let me take the lead.”

She nodded, but his voice sounded like it was coming through a can. The world spun around her slightly, forcing her to lean back against the wall and close her eyes. “Just a minute,” she whispered.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she lied as her head started to throb and a faint wave of light-headedness washed over her. She pulled her hand from his, afraid that it wasn’t just the claustrophobia or the bump to the head that was making her feel adrift.

She braced herself against the walls of the cave. The earth was cool and damp under her touch, and the dirt had given way to hard rock. The jagged edges scraped her hands, but the pain made her come back to herself. Lifting her hand, she wiped a speckle of blood from her palm.

Jeremy took her face in his hands. “You’re fine. Everything will be okay. You’re safe with me.”

In their little cocoon of warm yellow light, and wrapped in his hands, she believed him. She looked up into his face. She focused on the green depths of his eyes, blocking out everything else around her. After a while her breathing slowed as he caressed her face, moving a stray hair back from her neck.

“We won’t have to be in here much longer,” he whispered. “He has to be close.”

Jeremy’s warm fingertips brushed the skin right under her bottom lip, his touch making the cold rock beneath her feel that much cooler. Leaning in, he stole her lips, kissing her with a tenderness far deeper than the mine.

Everything around her disappeared. There was only him. His mouth on hers. The luscious texture of his tongue as it brushed over the curve of her lip, lightly caressing hers. He flicked his tongue, making her thighs tense, warmth rise from her core and her thoughts rush to the other places his mouth could explore.

His hands roamed down her neck, over her curves and down her hips. He pulled her against him, pressing her against his responding body. She didn’t know what it was. The fever with which he touched her, her long drought from masculine contact. Whatever it was, she kissed him back with a ravenous hunger. It felt—